Tag Archives: social media

MCC Live-Tweeting: Oscars 2019

February 25, 2019 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Gaga Cooper!

Each year I usually grab a pic of the host, but since the producers never filled the position, please enjoy this Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper moment that had already been turned into meme fodder before the ceremony ended.

At a lean 199 minutes, the 91st Academy Awards was perhaps among the speediest ceremonies in decades, but the memorable moments may have been fewer than usual because there were simply fewer opportunities for much to happen. A few presenters did their parts to liven things up — e.g., Samuel L. Jackson, Danai Gurira, James McAvoy, Barbra Streisand (a huge fan of Spike Lee, fellow Brooklynite), and a few others. The triple-threat comedy team of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph had a few minutes to fill the night’s joke quota up front, and did so with a flair enviable to those of us who didn’t watch Fey/Poehler host the Golden Globes a few years ago and who wish they could’ve been bribed into taking charge here all night long.

That being said, it was a very entertaining evening for any moviegoers who liked some of the biggest winners a lot more than I did.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During AND After the “Ralph Breaks the Internet” End Credits

November 26, 2018 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Ralph Breaks the Internet!

Fun in-joke scene for the eight people over 40 who ever loved AskJeeves.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the original Wreck-It Ralph. Not only did John C. Reilly’s layered performance hit me squarely in the heart with that big act of would-be noble sacrifice in the climax, but it later inspired me to write a jokey Top Ten-style follow-up that remains one of the site’s most enduring “evergreen” entries to this day. 2012 was a fun year for me in a lot of ways, and it tickles me to remember that Ralph was no small part of that.

Alas, with great success comes the threat of sequels. Disney Animation hasn’t released a theatrical sequel since Fantasia 2000 graced IMAX screens 18 years ago. Someone up high decided it was time to break the streak with Ralph Breaks the Internet, which, to be fair, tops very nearly every direct-to-video Disney sequel ever. I would have to see Aladdin and the King of Thieves again to decide between the two. That’s faint praise, though. Even as I dwell on the phrase “direct-to-video Disney”, memories of Dan Castellaneta’s Genie, Princess Ariel’s daughter, and The Fox and the Hound 2 return and make me wince.

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Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote!

November 6, 2018 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
I Voted!

Me as of 15 minutes ago.

(sung to the tune of the old “Meow Mix” commercial)

Vote vote vote vote!
Vote vote vote vote!
Vote vote vote vote!
Vote vote vote vote!

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“Searching”: You Can’t Find Someone You Don’t Know

September 22, 2018 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Searching!

Anyone who thinks it’s silly to watch a movie on a phone or PC should be delighted to see the tables get turned.

One of the odd dichotomies of living a robust online life is that we’re often better known to strangers in distant lands than we are to the offline, physically adjacent family and friends who have actual visual contact with us on a regular basis. There are parts of our lives with our loved ones that we would never discuss online, and yet there are things we share only with social media Friends and Followers. It’s rare for anyone we know to fall on both sides of the divide — sometimes because we’d rather not have to reconcile both worlds, but more often because members of one side have no interest in belonging to the other.

They like or love us on the one side, but either we don’t invite them to the other side, or they don’t feel a need to pursue us to the other. But if people only know one side of us and not the other, can they really say they know us?

The fascinating new film Searching takes a hard look at what happens when one side of a life implodes and the only way to save them is to take a leap across that deep divide.

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Our Privacy Practices Have Changed! Please Come Back Now, Europe?

May 26, 2018 By in Meta, Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Certificate of Completion!

We did it! We did it! Now someone tell our European readers we’re safe and legal again.

Over the past few days, internet users have been flooded with notifications from various websites, apps, and mailing lists they signed up for in a previous millennium, all declaring the official implementation of new updates to their privacy practices as mandated by the General Data Protection Regulation, Europe’s latest tool in the war on online shenanigans. At the core, it’s a good thing — European residents using computing gadgets should now have more insight and control into how their personal data is collected, stored, used, abused, and repurposed into fuel for the corporate engines that rely on us to be their consumer puppets. On a certain level it feels like an annoying form of paranoia, but this is the kind of response that occurs when multi-billion-dollar companies can’t give straight, morally upright answers to basic questions about what they do with all the 1s and 0s they harvest from our keystrokes.

As is wont to happen in the wake of radical societal upheavals, Comedy Twitter has been having a field day with the wave of emails, notifications, and pop-ups they’ve been receiving from organizations and proprietors desperate to comply and eager to keep their traffic from European visitors uninterrupted. I’ve laughed at too many to relay here without diminishing the effect, but some responses have been comedy gold.

Then tonight I found out even my own site was affected. I didn’t see that coming.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 5: Harry Potter and the Magic of Science

May 16, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Trek medical!

Sure, you could curate an exhibit on spaceflight and only include nonfictional space travel outfits…but why?

Once upon a time in 2007, I chaperoned a field trip to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Thanks to terrible traffic, we had exactly one (1) hour to see as much of the museum as we could before we had to board the bus and get the kids all the way back to their parents in Indianapolis. My small group, all boys, walked as briskly as they could without getting yelled at by docents, zipping from one exhibit to the next, which I’d chosen from the museum map in a series of deft but hasty hunches. It was a fun hour, but we saw less than 10% of the total museum.

Two years later, it was time for an encore. Same museum. Slightly more time to spare. Much, much worse traffic.

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Primaries Count as Voting, Too

May 10, 2018 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Electiontrooper!

Free stickers: a cornerstone of our democracy.

It was that time again! The first Tuesday in May was once again the pre-Election Day dry run when Americans in many districts have the chance to vote in primaries to decide which candidates will move forward in our aggravatingly binary political system. Primaries tend to lure a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the votes that actual Election Day does, but in some local races, our votes are no less important. Basically, 90% of the population cedes quite a few decisions to the 10% of us who feel compelled to show up and take advantage of their inertia. Advantage: us.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover Celebrates 6 Years of Stubbornly Blogging All Wrong

April 28, 2018 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Business Mirror!

New head shot taken at a recent business lunch, which is not a phrase that comes naturally to me. Neither do selfies.

I launched Midlife Crisis Crossover on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, applause for, revulsion at, and/or confusion arising from various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollow marketing, geek life, and sometimes food. It was also my way of finding a way to give myself excuses to write during a time when joining other people’s conversations was becoming increasingly dissatisfying and rare. Nobody talked about what I wanted to talk about; when they did, my opinions usually got me sent to go stand in the corner or flat-out ignored. And I couldn’t just not type.

Six years and 1,772 entries later, here I remain, not permanently burnt out, not yet out of anecdotes, still finding new experiences to relay, and, once in a blue moon, pulling out a different Moral of the Story to share with the kids these days that I haven’t already hammered into the ground in twelve previous posts.

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MCC Live-Tweeting: Oscars 2018

March 5, 2018 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jimmy Kimmel!

Tonight one random winner took home a statuette personally contaminated by the host himself!

The 90th Academy Awards kicked off Sunday night on ABC with a mildly amusing spoof of olde-tyme theatrical newsreels before returning host Jimmy Kimmel threw down an unprecedented gauntlet: winners were encouraged to speak on any topic they wanted to, no matter how political or incendiary, for as long as they wanted. This promise was eventually broken, much to the consternation of The Shape of Water producer J. Miles Dale, who got orchestra’d out of his spotlight moment because everyone had assumed director Guillermo Del Toro should have the last word.

Also intermittently livening up the night was Kimmel’s chief running gag, a promise of a free jet ski to whoever had the shortest speech. Thus began a night of push and pull, of comparison and contrast, of #MeToo and #TimesUp and diversity abounding and white guys still winning lots of things but not all the things.

Kimmel’s contributions and interruptions were kept to a barer minimum than last year, setting aside one segment that once again indulged his addiction to practical jokes on ordinary people. Assorted parties dropped a few wisecracks at the expense of high-ranking politicians as well as accused sex offenders, but a surprising amount of the commentary was kept on the positive side — a celebration of artists and advancement instead of roasting the haters and attackers. In that sense, some speeches were more refreshing than others.

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Is There Room at the Table for the Fake Followers Among Us?

January 31, 2018 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Buy Followers!

One of many robo-concierges polluting Twitter and willing to assist with your shallow self-image needs.

My favorite piece of journalism so far this year was just published January 27th over at the New York Times and struck a nerve in a number of places. In an epic-length article entitled “The Follower Factory”, the NYT plumbed the wobbly world of Twitter and those peculiar, insecure users who boost their Follower head count by paying a company actual money to bless them with hundreds of thousands of automated “bot” accounts that pretend they’re fans clinging on to their every tweet, for the purpose of making the paying customers look more popular. Some are piecemeal accounts, with profiles barely filled out. Quite a few are the product of surface-level identity theft, cribbing photos and usernames but with a character altered to make it unique (relatively speaking). They don’t praise you, go forth in your name, act as your “street team”, or interact with you or other humans in any meaningful way. They just Follow. They sit there, shut up, and act like you rule.

Companies such as Devumi cheerfully offer low-price options for ordinary web-surfing rabble like me, but they also bank some major cash selling bot followings by the hundreds of thousands to B-list celebrities, politicians, creators, reality TV dwellers, and others at varying levels of fame. The NYT named a few names I recognize — actor John Leguizamo, Chef Michael Symon, onetime MST3K guest star Kathy Ireland, and film critic Richard Roeper, whose Chicago Sun-Times reviews have been suspended pending their internal review. Of those who responded to requests for comment, a few buyers insisted it wasn’t them personally pushing the buttons, but an assistant or social media manager who bought a hollow audience on their behalf for PR strategy or whatever. Whether their deflections are true or not, boosts of fake fame are kind of sad. Granted, some personalities receive perks and bonuses from their corporate overlords based on the looks of their social media metrics, which means a return on their invidious investment is entirely possible. To them I imagine it’s all part of the Game.

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